Under new ownership, Here sets out its stall for the driverless car

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Nokia has completed the sale of its Here mapping business to a group of German car manufacturers, in a move which ends the dream of creating its own web services platform around the location software, but which may see that platform taking an important role in shaping the future of connected and autonomous car standards. The mapping firm wants to put itself at the heart of nascent efforts to develop standards for “cooperative intelligent transportation systems”, based on its maps and tools, and able to power whole urban transport and road safety platforms, including driverless vehicles, rather than just individual smart cars. This would be a powerful asset for the car industry to control, rather than the Silicon Valley players or the mobile operators, which may have seen intelligent transport as something they would naturally control.